The Key to Good Time Management

“Either run the day or the day runs you”

Hi lovely Motivation Seekers. How has your week been? I hope you managed to have a less stressful week after last week’s Motivator and FB Tips.

I have been noticing that nearly every client who sees me has two main things going on in their lives that leads to feeling stressed. These 2 main things are to do with

Not enough time to get everything done

Not enough money to survive or to live life the way you want to

So I am going to cover both of these and help you discover that you can have enough time and you can have enough money! Sounds good? We will do this over the next 2 weeks and I will post Tips on FB too. So, this week as you can guess from our quote it is about managing time. The quote is a good one as it sums up what time management is about. Setting priorities and being disciplined. At this point, you might be thinking – “No, that’s too hard, I could never do that.” Well if you think that, nothing will ever change. We are all about transformation, do you want to keep repeating the same old patterns and getting the same old results? Or, would you rather learn some new habits and beliefs and get more empowering results? I know which I prefer!

The Key to Good Time Management – Prioritise you Time

How much time do we have? We all moan about not having enough, but in each day there are 1,440 minutes, that’s quite a lot of minutes. Ok, extract from that sleeping time, that leaves you with 960 minutes, still a lot of time available. What you are doing with that time is the key. If you do one thing and one thing only it is to prioritise the important stuff and do that. We all have the same minutes, hours, days, weeks, months year after year. It’s how we spend that time that is going to make a huge difference to the achievements in our lives, the meaning in our lives and our sense of wellbeing. Here are 3 simple things you can do to start taking control of this and learning to prioritise.

Find out how you are spending your time now

Keep note during the day, what you are doing and the time you are spending doing it. Do this for a week and check where the time wasters are. I bet you will have heaps – scrolling through social media, watching repeat series on Netflix, reading emails etc etc. Note also why you are doing these things – it may be boredom, it could be avoidance or just feeling sorry for yourself. Becoming aware of the reasons why you have so many time-wasters is essential to make long lasting changes.

2. Kill the timewasters

Now that you know what your time-wasters are, think about how you can change that. My suggestion is that you try to bring in small changes at a time, it is more do-able that way. For example, if you watch Netflix 3 hours/day, cut down to 2, then 1, then 30 minutes, then knock it off. Another idea to help you gain more time is to defer checking your emails until later in the day. When you start your day with emails, it can suck the life out of you, not to mention all the hours it can take from you at your most productive time of day!

3. Delegate and/or ditch.

If you are struggling to fit in all the important stuff that needs to be done, consider if it is essential first. I remember as a busy new Mum, for some reason I felt that I had to vacuum the entire house every day…..what a waste of time! That was definitely something that could be ditched. Alternatively, ask for help, delegate some of the jobs, get everyone to share in the workload.

I hope these ideas help you. I also have a worksheet of the Stephen Covey 4 quadrant matrix to analyse how you are spending your time. Click here: